The conference investigates the imaginative, social and literary resources of English Catholic diaspora populations in the early modern period. The forum will also take stock of recent efforts to reevaluate the place of English Catholic authors in the literary canon of the English Renaissance. More broadly, the forum addresses the critical legacy of problems associated with early modern cultures of English Catholicism, problems that are being voiced with new accents in contemporary concerns of political and ethical theory: Who counts, finally, as my neighbor? How can the ethical being of cultural “others” be recognized and valued outside the normative dyad of sameness and difference?

By addressing the nexus of social, political, religious, theological, and literary discourses through which early modern Catholic identities were negotiated, the symposium aims to enhance scholarly purchase on lost or forgotten aspects of the rich texture of the experience of scattered Catholic communities within English literary tradition and political cultures; and it will promote channels of communication between early modern cultural studies of religion, current debates over the effects of secularization, and changing notions of the sacred vis-à-vis religious identity and practice in an era of globalization.